Original WaA 135 Stamp
 

This is a one of the kind item that a great collector from Germany brought to the P38 forum meeting recently in Louisville.

Many were found rusting out in the sewer system as a block in the system and he sold a few at our event.

No doubt this is an original "die".

I was lucky enough to get one, a very rare and unusual item.

Really liked meeting some of you in the hotel during "show and tell" ... till next year ... :)

Mark

Cool item for a display! What would that stamp have been found on, do you know???

It would be a Mauser WaA135 stamp on P.38's or HSc's or magazines for the P.38.

The stamp WaA135 is from 1944? when the change over for the code came from e/135?

Mark

I would love to have a die as a display - just something cool :)

You guys should start going to the P.38 Forum meeting. Alex was selling a few at the event.

Here is what some of the "horde" looked like blocking the sewer drain.

Mark

The WaffenAmt's proof dies were government assets that were carefully controlled and managed by the individual inspector responsible for government acceptance at Nazi military factories. Several sub-inspectors reported to the inspector, but he had the responsibility and the identity for all their actions as identified by his WaffenAmt inspector number.

Inspector 135 was assigned to Mauser from 1941-1945 when the war ended. French troops invading Wurttemberg overtook the Mauser factory in Oberndorf an Neckar just before the end of the war.

There were several sizes of inspector dies used at Mauser. This makes sense because everything from large gun receivers through very small parts were being inspected for military acceptance. All of these dies were very carefully locked away when the inspector working shift ended, and taken from the safe to be distributed to sub-inspectors at the beginning of the next day's shift.

They were all stored in a wooden box, the top of which had an aluminum plate with the sample impression of all the sizes of WaA135 stamps stored in the box. There was only one, since it was assigned personally to the single inspector (along with his number) who had responsibility for the dies' security.

The box with all the dies was saved from French capture by an employee of Mauser along with many company records just before the French arrived.

Ask me how I know all this? I have seen the box and dies (and have agreed to protect the privacy of the collector that is curating them). The set has provenance and is indisputably the original set used by the inspector at Mauser.

It's interesting to see the cache of rusted dies in the photo in this thread. They all appear to be the same size. There are also a lot more of them than the dies of that size I saw in the Mauser inspector's kit.

Marc

Marc, was each of the dies in that cluster found in the sewer a different number? Is it your impression that these were all "new" or replacement dies? or were these in use, and discarded for whatever reason?

The dies that I described were in a kit, stored in a wooden box and all assigned to inspector "135". As a result, all of them in all the different sizes were Eagle/WaA135 dies.

While it's possible that they were hidden in a sewer for a period of time, neither the box nor the dies deteriorated there. The dies in the box look like new without any corrosion.

Here's what the plate with sample die stamps attached to the top of the wooden box looks like:

http://forum.lugerforum.com/attachme...1&d=1458316087

(Note that the image is intentionally distorted to make it useless to fakers making new dies... - I posted this to illustrate the variety of dies in the kit.)

Looks like more dies were found than the ones I was aware of...

See Gerben's post on the P38forum about additional batches of WaA135 dies that were discovered in 2000 in Oberndorf:

http://p38forum.com/forums/showthrea...t=34140&page=2